Kevin James

I hold the Scottish Studies Foundation Chair and am Professor of History at the University of Guelph. My work explores tourism and travel history, with a focus on hotels in Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. I examine tourism and travel through the prisms of class, gender and race, and also have a strong interest in wartime tourism and disruptions to the sector caused by disease, conflict and natural disaster. My work has included critical histories of the global hotel, historical population studies, and examinations artefacts of everyday life, from postcards to receipts to autograph books, that illuminate historical experience. I have held fellowships and grants in Canada, the US, Scotland and Ireland and work with partners in Switzerland, Scotland and around the world.

I also am Director of the Centre for Scottish Studies at the University of Guelph, which has the largest academic programme in Scottish Studies outside Scotland, and whose Library has the largest archival and print collection of Scottish materials outside the UK.